All items: Working-hours limits

In Arriva London South Ltd v Nicolaou EAT/0293/11, the EAT held that an employer's refusal to allow an employee who had not opted out of the 48-hour week to work overtime on rest days did not give rise to unlawful detriment.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that a worker who had not opted out of the 48-hour working week did not suffer detrimental treatment when his employer refused him the opportunity to work voluntary overtime on a rest day.

In making the Working Time Regulations, Parliament intended that all contracts of employment must be read so as to provide that an employee should work no more than an average of 48 hours per week during any 17-week reference period, holds the High Court in Barber and others v RJB Mining (UK) Ltd.

In Clamp v Aerial Systems, the EAT holds that, in a case where the applicant withdrew his consent to opt out of the maximum 48-hour week set by the Working Time Regulations 1998, the applicant had not suffered a detriment within the meaning of s.45A of the Employment Rights Act 1996.

In Federación de Servicios Privados del sindicato Comisiones Obreras v Tyco Integrated Security SL and another [2015] IRLR 935 ECJ, the ECJ held that, for peripatetic workers who travel directly to customer addresses from home and who travel home directly from customer addresses at the end of the working day, the time spent travelling on those first and last journeys of the day is working time within the meaning of art.2 of the Working Time Directive.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has held that where a worker has no usual place of work, time spent travelling from and to home for the first and last customer visits of the day, should be counted as working time.

An employer's right to require overtime from an employee who is under a contractual obligation to be "on call" for a specified number of hours in excess of his basic working week, is subject to the employer's implied duty to take reasonable care not to injure its employee's health, holds the Court of Appeal in Johnstone v Bloomsbury Health Authority.

In McLean v Rainbow Homeloans Ltd [2007] IRLR 14 EAT, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has held that an employee was unfairly dismissed for asserting a statutory right when he refused to work extra hours that would have been a breach of the Working Time Regulations 1998.

In our latest round-up of cases from the European Court of Justice, we look at cases on equal pay, maternity leave and equal treatment, the variation of terms relating to early retirement following a transfer of an undertaking, working time and European Works Councils.

In Pfeiffer and others v Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, Kreisverband Waldshut eV, the European Court of Justice held that the exclusion of 'road transport' from the provisions of the Working Time Directive did not cover emergency workers, even when they used a road vehicle and accompanied patients on their journeys to hospital.

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